Yarimar Bonilla Named Interim Director of El Centro

Dr. Bonilla, who joined the faculty in 2018, was born in San Juan and spent part of her childhood in Topeka and Phoenix before returning to Puerto Rico at the age of 12. She received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA from the University of New Mexico, and a PhD from the University of Chicago. She previously taught at the University of Virginia and Rutgers. In 2018 she was named a Carnegie Fellowship for her research on the social impact of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

“I look forward to working through this moment of transition with the different constituencies that Centro serves,” said Dr. Bonilla. “I am proud to be part of the ever-evolving Puerto Rican community of New York and excited to build Centro’s connections with its community roots. Centro’s mission has never been more urgent as Puerto Rico faces the compounding effects of economic, political, and environmental health crises, which in turn reverberate across the diaspora. “Given that my focus has long been on public-facing scholarship that pushes beyond the confines of the academy, I am particularly eager to grow the interdisciplinary scope of Centro. In particular, I want to create more opportunities for artists to use the archives and develop their work in dialogue with the CUNY community. I also want to forge partnerships with our scientific community who have so much to tell us as we navigate a post-disaster and post-pandemic future.”

Centro at Hunter College
Centro is the acclaimed CUNY research institute dedicated to the study, interpretation, and preservation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. Founded in 1973, the center conducts interdisciplinary research and collects, preserves, and disseminates its incomparable resources documenting Puerto Rican history and culture. Centro works to share its collections and scholarship not only with researchers and students at Hunter and around the world, but also with government leaders and non-profit institutions in an effort and advance public policy discussions and nourish social action.

Among other initiatives, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro de Estudios Puertoriquenos) provides research grants and fellowships—including a Research Exchange Program that has benefitted more than 100 resident scholars to date—while offering an array of student internship opportunities. Centro also maintains one of the most extensive Latino research libraries and archives in the nation, the Evelina López Antonetty Research Collection, in a state of the art facility at the Silberman campus. The archive houses, among other highlight treasures, the archives of former Congressmen Herman Badillo and Jose Serano as well as those of the National Puerto Rican Coalition.

The Center also manages Centro Press, which has published 15 titles to date with more forthcoming; and issues the thrice-yearly Centro Journal, which presents important scholarship on political economy, history, and Puerto Rican migration and work, along with social policy analysis. In addition, Centro has amassed and maintains a vast collection of oral history (Centro Voices), which has conducted and archived more than 300 interviews; a data center housing information on Puerto Ricans throughout the U.S.; and a video network (Centro TV) that has launched a documentary series celebrating pioneers of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Additionally, the Centro Digital Collections provide an unparalleled resource for academics, researchers, students, genealogists, filmmakers, and the community at large.

Dr. Yarimar Bonilla
Dr. Bonilla is a Professor in Hunter’s Department of Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies, and in the Anthropology Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is an award-winning scholar and prominent public intellectual, Dr. Bonilla is a major voice on issues of Caribbean and Latinx politics. She has contributed to the New Yorker, the Nation, and the Washington Post, writes a monthly column called “En Vavién” for Puerto Rico’s newspaper El Nuevo Día, and is frequently heard on National Public Radio and television programs such as Democracy Now. Most recently, she contributed an episode to WNYC’S new bilingual radio series about Puerto Rico, La Brega.

She has written for scholarly journals on such subjects as the role of digital protest in the Black Lives Matter movement, post-disaster impacts in contemporary Puerto Rico, and anti-colonial labor struggles in the French Caribbean.

She is the author of the books Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015); Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019); and the forthcoming Trouillot Remixed (2021). Her digital projects include Visualizing Sovereignty: Animated Video of Caribbean Political History, which she co-designed, and the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project (#PRSyllabus), which she co-created to provide an open access resource for teaching and learning about the socio-economic crises affecting Puerto Rico.

Dr. Edwin Meléndez
Dr. Meléndez, a long-respected specialist in Latino Studies, economic development, poverty, and labor markets, is a Professor of Urban Policy & Planning at Hunter. He is the author of 13 books, including State of Puerto Ricans (2017) and Puerto Ricans at the Dawn of the New Millennium (2014), both published by Centro Press, which he helped establish, and Latinos in a Changing Society (Prager, 2017). In addition to his scholarship, Dr. Meléndez has a long record of community and public service, having served as Chair of the ASPIRA Association National Board, Vice President of the Board of Directors of UnidosUS, and membership on the New York Hurricane Maria Memorial Agenda, among other posts.

Dr. Meléndez will step down on June 30 after 13 years at the helm of Centro where he was instrumental in growing Centro’s programs, developing partnerships across the country, and strengthening Centro’s outreach to disseminate research. He has also served on a number of government task forces and commissions. Before joining the Hunter faculty, he taught at the New School, the University of Massachusetts, MIT, and Fordham.